Transition
110a Lauriston Road, London E9 7HA
www.transitiongallery.co.uk
transition@huntergather.com
07941 208566 / 020 8533 7843
E9: An Anatomy
of an Area
Clive Brandon
Tania McCormack Gary O’Connor Mike Perry
October 16
– November 14 2004 Fri – Sun 1-6pm
Admission
- Free
A small corner of East London comes under the magnifying glass, as the
postal district that the gallery happens to be in becomes the theme for
this show. Curiously this specificity becomes universal as the details
that the artists focus on could be from any urban neighbourhood. A chance
meeting in a park, street furniture, overgrown corners of wilderness.
These eclectic urban musings and jumbled city thoughts are neither sensational,
nor shocking but by their very ordinariness they connect to something
beautifully strange and profound. With this trawling through both the
badlands and the genteel gentrified areas of E9, the exasperating, cursed
tangle of this churned up city* gives up its ghostly melancholies revealing
a hinterland of hidden delights.
Clive Brandon quite literally maps the E9 area by walking around its boundaries
in the manner of some miniature urban Grand Tour. The resultant paintings
and drawings are determined by a combination of conceptual parameters
and random meanderings, giving equal importance to the banal, the ugly
and the picturesque.
Tania McCormack makes numerous bus journeys and walks, recording her experiences
in trembly, scribbly, freehand line drawings and embroideries on bus tickets,
postcards and paper. The immediacy of these direct responses, not filtered
through a photographic or pondered axis, recall the quixotic, drifting
nature of the visual experience of a journey.
Gary O’Connor is interested in the ‘space between reality
and the imaginary’. For E9 his starting point is Victoria Park -
the place where his parents first met. From here he creates a quasi-imaginary
narrative work that includes writing, sound and T-shirts and incorporates
influences from Suffragettes to Situationists.
Mike Perry’s large-scale photographs focus on the intersection of
city and wilderness by turning their gaze to the urban brown-fields of
Hackney Wick’s canal district. The result is a series of dreamy,
empty landscapes that record this transitory area before it is swallowed
up by proposed redevelopment.
There will be a publication to accompany E9, which will include specially
commissioned writing by Tony White and visuals by the E9 artists. Priced
at £4.50 it will be available from Transition and selected outlets
*The Selected Poems of William Blake – Dr Bruce Woodcock
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